[thelist] Jakob Nielsen [was Anti-aliasing]

BT Bigpant bigpant at btinternet.com
Sat Feb 23 11:51:01 CST 2002


>http://www.useit.com/   View Source

>Perhaps if you have a look at meta "keywords" and "description" and think
>about it for a moment, it will come to light for you.

Sorry, as much as I find Jack Neilson's opinions tedious and mostly
inapropriate for todays internet, I cannot see how he is spamming search
engines with this:

<meta name="keywords" content="Jakob Nielsen, Jacob Nielson, Jakob Nielson,
Neilsen, Web usability, User Interface Design, discount usability
engineering, user testing, usability inspection, heuristic evaluation,
hypertext, WWW Web design, UI, GUI, HCI, CHI, human-computer interaction">
<meta name="description" content="Alertbox column, Web usability, usability
engineering, and Jakob's minimalist approach to Web quality; good
sites/books about design; Jakob's biography">

So he reapeated his name spelt the same twice. Big deal. I think he may have
meant to put another spelling on the third name, but got it wrong. Maybe.
Maybe not, but I would hardly consider a single instance of doubling a key
phrase a case of search engine spamming.

Or did I miss something ?

On the topic of his "emailto" opinion, I think he is extremely naive about
this. There are a numbe of ways of hiding the email address from search
bots, and still allowing the user to email him simply.

<tip type="links" subject="prevention of email address harversting">
To avoid search bots getting hold of your email address from your website,
try using javascript to write it out in 2 sections:

var email_address =  "<a href='mai";
    email_address += "lto:name";
    email_address += "@address.com'>email me</a>";
document.write(email_address);

this will write
<a href='mailto:name at address.com>email me</a>

but because javascript does not rewrite the page source, it will prevent
search bots grabbing the email address.
</tip>


Phil Parker




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